Editorial: Words that matter

Scituate is one of about 50 cities and towns in Massachusetts that have declared themselves a “No Place for Hate” community, part of an antibigotry program by the Anti-Defamation League.

But selectmen are looking to possibly sever ties from the No Place for Hate program because of the ADL’s failure to use the term “genocide” to denounce the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians before, during and after World War I.

If Scituate does follow through on the proposal by Selectman John Danehey, whose wife and children are of Armenian descent, it would be the fourth town in Massachusetts following Newton, Belmont and Watertown.

As we have learned from history, education, not isolation, is the way to combat ignorance, and Scituate and other towns looking to shun the ADL would be better served by using their status as a certified No Place for Hate community to effectuate change with their anti-bigotry partner.

The issue came to a head last month after Watertown pulled its affiliation because the national ADL would not endorse a congressional resolution to declare the Armenian massacre genocide.

Trying to defuse the uproar, ADL Executive Director Abraham Foxman stated that the atrocities were “tantamount to genocide.”

“We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities,” Foxman said in a statement. “On reflection, we have come to share the view of Henry Morgenthau Sr. that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide. If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide.”

As many Jews, blacks, Asians, Hispanics and just about anyone else who has ever experienced bigotry can tell you, words matter. And Armenians, who have long been trying to find worldwide recognition for the slaughter they endured, want their history to be included alongside that of the Jews, Rwandans, Sudanese and any other number of ethnic groups killed in the name of ethnic cleansing.

Under Foxman’s reasoning, then, the Holocaust would not be genocide because the word was not coined until 1944, when a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, used it to describe the Armenian genocide and the 1933 Assyrian massacre committed by the Iraqi government.

It was not until 1948 that the United Nations codified the word

genocide to define “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

But as we know, no matter when the term came into use, the Holocaust was, indeed, genocide by any name and so is the Armenian genocide.

Foxman wrote a letter to the editor printed last month in Ha’Aretz, an Israeli daily newspaper, going one step further in using the term genocide to denounce the carnage, although still not addressing the congressional resolution.

But it’s a start and one that shows ADL officials, unlike hardheaded bigots, are not immune to learning. If Scituate, or any of the other towns which proudly display the No Place for Hate signs and stickers, disassociate themselves, then it opens the doors for more haters to fling their arrows at Jews and compromise the solid work the ADL has done for nearly a century.